SITUATION

The majority of the development team is currently focused on a hotfix for the recently released Update 1.66. There are a few issues we're investigating, but more on them later in this report. Aside from that, Dev-Branch is about to receive some cool additions before Christmas. All in all, everything in Arma 3 is set for a splendid winter break.

INTELLIGENCE

ModDB, the largest platform covering modifications of various games, have once again started their Mod of the Year competition. For the next couple of days, players are able to vote for their favorite mods. Naturally, there are also Arma 3 modifications included. This is a great opportunity for all of us to send the mod teams some love and gratitude. Hurry up to send your vote on time, you too can win some prizes.

Quite an unusual screenshot landed in our Twitter feed. Spanish community unit Grupo Armados conducted a Cold Invasion in Arma 3. Taking advantage of Arma 3's modability and using winter camouflage and terrains full of snow, the immersion is nearly perfect! We certainly hope everybody was served with a hot cup of tea after the operation concluded.

Another Spanish group brings us to some completely different environments. From forests to dusty deserts, FO148 relies on their fierce warriors to complete various objectives. Of course, with the presence of some Splendid Camera operators, everything is documented in a set of excellent screenshots.

The latest Weekly Photo shows the result of a stealth operation in our Amsterdam studio. Despite heavily disadvantageous camouflage, top-tier infiltrator Sinterklaas managed to deliver a package to the very heart of our Dutch dev team, without Joris-Jan van 't Land or Karel Mořický noticing. The experience of several hundred years speaks for him, of course. We hope our Dutch colleagues enjoy the sweet delivery while setting up a more solid security system.

Our colleagues over at the Project Argo team have just announced a fun little contest. To support the Malden 2035 terrain development, they are asking the community to submit designs for in-game billboards by competing in the "Create-Your-Own-Billboard" contest. It's also very relevant for Arma 3, since the Malden terrain (including the winning billboard) will be made available to the Arma 3 platform in 2017 as a free DLC (we've touched the topic in the Roadmap 2016-17 blog). The submission deadline is January 17th, and be sure to read the rules carefully and submit your own ideas to leave your mark on Malden. Unleash your inner-(m)adman, let the contest begin!

OPERATIONS

As we've already hinted, we're now intensively working on a hotfix for Update 1.66 and hope to release it later this week. Shortly after the release we found out that some of the script commands ceased to work correctly. This caused severe issues for large community groups. Unluckily, even three weeks of public RC testing did not help with revealing these issues beforehand. While our QA performs a deep build test before every update, due to the complexity of the game and a relatively small size of our internal Quality Assurance team it can be very difficult to uncover and address some of these issues. We'd like to again encourage our community to provide us their feedback - both via the Feedback Tracker and social media. Thanks!

Some of the reports we also received pointed out problems with referencing obsolete proxies on community made terrains. Arma 3's Project Lead Petr Kolář explains the situation and the solution we've come up with: "As part of the fixing period leading up to Update 1.66, we decided to clean the data of the game. Some of the proxies were merged into parent objects, aiming to improve the game's performance, and the original models for proxies were deleted. As this caused some issues with community terrains, we have now decided to bring the old files back while also still having them merged into the parent objects. As the proxies cannot have all the necessary geometries, keep in mind that they may not behave as expected when put into the terrain directly."<

One of the recent Dev-Branch additions, Dynamic Simulation, is now documented on the Community Wiki. Bringing significant improvement possibilities to community scenario makers, the feature helps to address some long-standing issues connected to the AI count on large scale terrains. Naturally, not every scenario is suitable for this, yet we hope the benefits will help make Arma 3 a more smooth and fast platform. As Dynamic Simulation is currently only available in Dev-Branch, feel free to provide your feedback on the forums. It's very appreciated!

Dynamic Simulation is not the only addition appearing on Dev-Branch this December. There are several more improvements we'd like to introduce to you before the winter break. Without going into specific details, let's just say that both platform performance improvements and some playable content additions are expected. Stay tuned; our official Twitter channel and the Dev-Branch changelog thread will reveal more details Soon™.

As per usual, there will be some downtime at the Bohemia offices during the winter holiday. The Arma 3 team will cease regular operations on December 16th and will come back online in January. During this period, no Dev-Branch releases are expected and the communication on social media will be less as well.

LOGISTICS

Bohemia Interactive forums software will undergo an update this week. Please expect that the site will be in a read-only state for two to five days. After that, you might still see some formatting issues in some of the older posts, but those should be converted/corrected automatically over the course of the next week. Thank you for your patience and apologies for the inconvenience.